Sometimes building your own robot is easier said than done. It can be easy
to visualize what we want but then to actually build it can be more difficult
or, in some cases, seemingly impossible. Other times, it is more a matter of
not having a budget for the entire robot. Spare parts can be found in a
number of places and different people have different interests in specific
microcontrollers so I won’t focus on that in this article. Instead, the focus
here will be on getting a useable robot platform built on a minimal budget.

FIGURE 1.

Parallax
motor mount
and wheel kit.

The Drive Train

The drive train determines how the robot will move so
that is the first thing you should decide on before getting
started. Wheel robots are the easiest to build and often
the simplest to control in terms of movement, so that is
what will be used in this article as an example. Parallax,
Inc., offers a motor mount and wheel kit which I’ll be
using in this article (sans wheel encoders), but you can
use any type of drive motor and wheel combination to
achieve the same results as you will see in some of the
examples.

A Wooden Robot?

Why not? When we think of robots, most of us
probably wouldn’t think of wood. We would visualize a
metal robot or even plastic. However, wood has several